By midmorning, onto the sun-drenched fields surrounding the villages in the rear of the sector came the French guns, more than three hundred of them, drawn by horses and surrounded by teams of French artillerymen frantically digging emplacements, throwing up branches and camo netting, and stockpiling shells for the next day’s work. To make space and avoid German counter-battery fire during the battle, most of Summerall’s artillery batteries had moved the night before into new positions.
After dark the previous night, twenty-nine-year-old Lt. Daniel Sargent of Massachusetts, an officer with Battery F of the 5th Field Artillery, had helped his crews haul their 155s a half mile closer to Cantigny. For the three weeks prior, he and his gunners had enjoyed “beautiful dug-outs” in their positions near Sérévillers. But on the night of May 26, up on the edge of some woods, they “had no dug-outs and had slept on the ground.”
In the morning, a messenger came by motorcycle from General Summerall’s headquarters to retrieve Sargent for a special mission. Riding by sidecar on roads back to Mesnil-Saint-Firmin, Sargent peered through passing corridors of open fields stretching to the horizon and noticed “an unfamiliar sight—an endless row of heavy French artillery: howitzers that looked to be 210’s, and huge mortars that I estimated to be 240’s.… There had been none of these batteries here yesterday.”
The messenger drove Lieutenant Sargent into the paved streets of town and up to Division Headquarters, “a grandiose nineteenth century chateau of brick, with a park beside it.” He was ushered downstairs into the headquarters of Generals Bullard and Summerall, a “rather ornate basement” with sandbags stacked against its brick walls and housing a bustling command center that reeked of scorched coffee and smoldering Chesterfields. George Marshall was seated, scratching out last-minute directives, his foot in a cast and propped up on a wooden chair after a spill from his horse had snapped his ankle the day before.
Puffing on a cigarette, a gray-haired French officer in an unbuttoned, threadbare tunic asked Sargent if he could speak French. He answered “a little bit,” and was told his assignment in the next day’s battle was to help liaison between the 1st Division and the French artillery. On a sector map draped over a table, a young French lieutenant pointed to a mark depicting an observation post up at the front lines where Sargent was to station himself by 5:45 a.m., and showed with a penciled line the path he was to take there. The French officer folded the map, gave it to Sargent, and sent him on his way with a final reminder: “Don’t be late.”
But as Lieutenant Sargent left, disturbing news began trickling into headquarters by telegram and by phone. That morning, thirty divisions of the German 1st and 7th Armies had attacked seven French and British divisions along a quiet front on the Chemin des Dames, and all reports indicated the enemy was, in Pershing’s words, “making dangerous headway.” The raid that morning against the 28th had been one of many matching “feint attacks” launched against the Allied front, all intended to distract from the renewed offensive, the third stage of Kaiserschlacht. This one was aimed directly toward Paris, and as General Ludendorff noted proudly: “Once more it proved a brilliant success.”
To halt the enemy’s alarming progress, forty-one French divisions were hustled into the breach, but still more were needed. By late afternoon, General Bullard and his staff learned this would include the French Corps artillery that had been designated to reinforce the next day’s attack. The big French guns—the only ones with sufficient range to reach all enemy batteries—would still support the initial bombardment and infantry assault, but would withdraw after the objective was reached. “This was a heavy blow,” Marshall noted, “as we were to depend on these guns to suppress the enemy’s artillery fire, which would undoubtedly be directed at our infantry in their unsheltered positions on the final objectives.”
Although this was the most devastating setback to the planned operation yet, General Bullard was confident his infantry could still hold. No obstacle—not an engineer officer and his map falling into enemy hands, not an enemy raid causing five dozen casualties to the attack’s first wave, and not even this loss of critical counter-battery support—nothing was standing in the 1st Division’s way. The battle was, as ever, still a go.
* * *
As the day slid toward dusk and late-afternoon shadows stretched, legions of khaki poured out of trucks and streamed across the plains toward the front lines. “As we left the trucks we heard the big naval guns barking for the first time,” Pvt. John Johnston later recounted. “We were headed for the first all-American fight—for Cantigny.” Each company was met by a guide from their advance team and, in the failing light, shepherded through paths to avoid shelled areas. “That night everything seemed quiet,” one officer noted, “yet on the roads and on every path leading down to the front went constant files of infantry, machine-gunners, engineers, and carrying parties.”
The night was, as one artillery officer described, “as black as hell itself,” and as the lead column of doughboys loaded down in full gear felt their way forward through Death Valley, gas shells pinged into the darkness. Helmets and rifles and ammo boxes fell to the ground as men scrambled to yank their masks from canvas bags and strap them on. Leading a squad in the long column, nineteen-year-old Cpl. Charles Simmons Jr. had been fiddling on the dark march with a loose rifle grenade strapped to the shoulder strap of his pack. In his fogged mask, as he threw his gear back on, the grenade blew. His helmet was blown off and he fell in a heap to the dirt, with his shredded gas mask revealing a mass of blood. Simmons was unconscious but still breathing when his men loaded him on a stretcher, but by the time he reached the field hospital, he was dead. When his widower father, Charles Sr., received word by telegram from the War Department that his only son had been killed in action, he asked that his remains be returned home. After the Armistice, Charles Simmons Jr. was buried in a family plot in Whitewright, Texas.
It was 11:00 p.m. when Maj. Raymond Austin, in his dugout on a hilltop near his batteries of 75s, was handed a folded piece of paper by a motorcycle courier, who motored off to the next command post with a satchel filled with more of the same. Austin held the sheet up to his beacon light: “Very Secret. H hour will be 6:45 a.m. By command of Major General Bullard.” Austin notified his crews, who would be firing the creeping barrage, and they “prepared schedules for each gun,” he later recounted. They taped lined charts of coordinates to their gun barrels, “each line covering one minute of firing,” which would, the next morning, be “torn off as the firing for each minute was completed.” Battery commanders all across the sector received the same message by messengers dispatched from Division Headquarters with strict orders to deliver the H-hour notice “in person,” not by telephone.
With H-hour set, timing—precise and to the microsecond—was paramount. Back in the afternoon, two “reliable watches” had been synchronized by Bullard’s staff with the division clock and sent by runner up to Colonel Ely’s bunker. More watches were then set with those, and so the process had continued through the afternoon and into the evening until every battery officer, machine-gun crew, and platoon leader was synchronized. Phone calls were then made to each command post and artillery battery from Division Headquarters to double-check that all were running in tandem.
* * *
Around midnight, the companies arrived at the front and entered communication trenches single-file, company by company, platoon by platoon, and man by man. Lt. Richard Newhall met his platoon and guided them into their lines on the far left; then with remaining columns still scattered after the gas attack “came a wait of perhaps an hour before the first platoon with Haydock leading appeared out of the dark.”
Into the freshly dug jumping-off trenches the doughboys crammed. Man after man, clutching Springfields and top-heavy with full packs and crowded web belts, dropped with exhausted sighs against the rear trench wall, each trying to stake a claim on a precious plot of dirt. Troops kept shuffling in, forcing the rows to slide closer and closer until they were shoulder to shoulder. Platoon leaders urged their soldiers to try to rest, and some caught catnaps wedging their heads back into soft parts of the trench wall. But in the tight space, the bustle of activity was unending, and seated troops were constantly pulling their legs up to clear paths for strangers from other units, all in hunched shuffles, carrying machine guns and tripods and ammo boxes and barbed-wire coils into position.
Three miles away, Division Headquarters was under sporadic fire from the long-range German guns when General Pershing arrived to confer with General Bullard one last time about the attack. On the drive in, shell fragments had pinged like hailstones off the metal roof of his command car. His driver, Sgt. Cesar Santini, parked under the cover of some trees and, as he would later recall, “[I] tried my best to take a little snooze on the seat. More than once the shells fell too close to the machine to make me feel comfortable.” He even watched as a mortar round hit the headquarters directly, destroying a chimney.
Downstairs, in the cellar command center, Pershing talked over the attack with Bullard, then spoke with the French artillery liaison, Col. Jacques de Chambrun, who assured the Big Chief, between puffs on a pipe, of the division’s readiness. Pershing departed to spend the night at his forward headquarters north of Paris, leaving the patchwork of infantry and artillery staff and engineers and signalmen and French liaison officers to toil by lamplight, each focused on indispensable cogs in their respective gears of the large machine. In the small hours of morning, the phone rang with a message from the front: “5440,” code for “every element in position for attack.”
* * *
Lt. Daniel Sargent again spent the night sleeping on the cold, hard ground near his artillery battery, and was jolted awake by a nightmare that he had overslept. “Don’t be late”—the parting words of the French lieutenant back at Division Headquarters kept replaying in Sargent’s head, a ringing reminder of this morning’s mission. Scanning the dark night sky, he was reassured of the early hour as he found no hint of morning light. “I could see the stars above the trees and also I could read my watch,” he observed.
It was not yet 4:00 a.m., the assigned hour for the guard to wake him, but with thoughts of his assignment clogging his mind, more sleep for Lieutenant Sargent would be impossible. The artillery was scheduled to begin its bombardment of German positions at 5:45 a.m. precisely, and it was imperative that he make it to his observation post up at the front lines by then. Although a few minutes ahead of schedule, he worried there was “still a chance of being late,” so he stashed his folded map, a canteen of water, and a slice of bread into his pack and set off for the front.
Sargent noticed, as he came out of a patch of dark woods and into the open, that the night was clear and the fields leading toward the front “seemed to be luminous. There were only the stars to light me from the sky, but there was no haze.” These conditions would aid his task of observation, but they would also make obvious artillery targets of any doughboys clustered out in the open without cover should they be spotted by German observation pilots. By a few minutes past 4:00 a.m., as Sargent continued his starlit walk through his carefully planned route toward his observation post, most of the men at the front were still resting, either huddled in trenches or assembled under the tree cover of woods behind the front lines.
But the 150 members of Company D, 1st Engineers, were resting in the open, bunched together in an old chalk quarry two hundred yards behind the front line. On the east side of the quarry was a thirty-foot-tall cliff wall that cut into the landscape that ascended toward the front lines. Though it provided a comforting bit of cover from enemy shells, the resting men could be seen clearly from overhead. They had been there for about two hours, and aside from a single German plane that had circled over their position earlier, their time in the quarry was passing uneventfully. Most had dropped their packs and cartridge belts and were lying down, their rifles and gas masks at their side, attempting to catch a bit of sleep in the final moments before the bombardment began.
Serene moments near the front were rare, but this morning was so quiet that twenty-six year-old Cpl. Boleslaw Suchocki, a Polish immigrant who worked as a cabinetmaker back in Worcester, Massachusetts, before volunteering to serve his adopted country as an Army engineer, “could hear a fly buzzing in the air” around him. The dead calm was charged with an awareness of the coming battle, and it shrouded a scene that mixed anxious expectation and calm brooding. Some men were sleeping wherever they could make space, either flat on the rocky ground or leaned back against the cliff wall. Others were sitting up smoking cigarettes, prepared to extinguish them at any more signs of an enemy spotter plane. For his part, Corporal Suchocki paced in full gear, working off nervous energy. The company first sergeant implored him: “Suchocki, why don’t you rest. We have a big job tomorrow.”
Many were kept awake by nerves and fear, and others by the chill carried in the twilight air. Lt. John McClure later remembered stretching out with two other lieutenants and trying to sleep, “but after one had slept for a while, he would wake up from the cold, aching all over.” Clothed and equipped only with what they needed for battle, none had blankets or overcoats. “I was colder than I had been in a long time and several times walked up and down the valley toward Colonel Ely’s bunker to get the blood to flowing again,” McClure noted.
As the pitch-black darkness began to give way to the first glimmers of faint light, McClure was with fellow lieutenants Boyd Crawford and Hamlet Jones near the road at the opening of the quarry, and the three were “all awake, half sitting up.” Standing nearby, Corporal Suchocki could hear the three of them “carrying on a very interesting conversation.” Recounting the moment later, McClure relayed, “I remarked to Jones on my right that we should get the men up the hill under the trees there, so any early planes would not spot them.” Lieutenant Jones agreed, but thought there was still sufficient darkness to allow the men to rest a few minutes more, so they waited.
It was 4:20 a.m. In just twenty-five more minutes the artillery would fire at assigned targets to register the guns and gauge the wind and range for the opening bombardment. Platoon and section leaders would then get their men geared up and moved to their assigned starting positions for the attack. All was set to move like clockwork, but as the previous morning’s enemy raid had grimly demonstrated, the best-laid plans hold no control over the crush of events. That morning, fate again threatened to disrupt the planned attack as the stillness in the quarry was broken by the whistling of an incoming shell. The sound sailed over the resting men and hit with an explosion a few yards behind them, where the ground descended into Death Valley.
“It burst with a thunderous roar,” Corporal Suchocki observed. As he dropped to the ground, he could hear lead shrapnel “go way up in the air with [a] buzzing sound like [a] swarm of bees.” Men scrambled to grab their packs and rifles. Those who were sleeping were jarred awake, their stunned eyes adjusting to the mayhem. As the engineers scattered, Suchocki told them there “is no need to run around because we don’t know where the next shell will fall.” Lieutenant McClure saw two men rush toward the cliff wall for better cover, and had to laugh when he saw one of them fall over a pile of empty artillery shell casings in a clattering panic. He tried to calm the men, assuring them it was “an impossibility for a shell to hit in there on account of the hill and cliff.”
McClure’s fellow lieutenants Crawford and Jones had each sat up at the sound of the explosion, and it was only a few moments before another whistle sounded from above. “We heard another one coming,” McClure noted, and he and the others thought “it was going over” like the first shell. But abruptly the whistling stopped, the air went silent, and it hit. “I saw lighting,” McClure later recounted. He only heard the beginning of the explosion before he was struck with “an awful wallop.” Corporal Suchocki later summoned the moment from his memory with grisly clarity: “At once a tremendous explosion shocked the air, the quarry was filled with thick dust, blood, and terrible sights, some of the men [were] tore into pieces.”
Fatal sprays of horseshoe-sized shell fragments lashed the cluster of men in the quarry. Lieutenant McClure was hit by shrapnel and struck by the blast concussion but was somehow still conscious. “I had a random thought, real quick, that a stray chunk of that one hit me in the head coming down.” He asked Jones if he was hurt, but got no response. He asked the same of Crawford and was met with the same silence. The outlines of figures were only barely discernible in the faint predawn light, and McClure thought Jones had only been knocked unconscious. McClure called two men over to help pick him up to drag him to the first-aid station dug into the face of the cliff.
Corporal Suchocki rushed to get Lieutenant Crawford and noticed that “as soon as I put my arms under his shoulders there was no bone at all.” He and another man carried Crawford, whose body felt “as soft as a pillow,” over to first aid while Lieutenant McClure and two others carried Jones. As Suchocki lowered Crawford onto a stretcher, he heard a “deep sigh,” which he knew “was the last signs of his life.” Crawford was dead. Jones, who had shown no signs of life since the blast, was dead also. In all likelihood he had been killed instantly, as one officer nearby estimated: “Jones never knew what hit him.”
Corporal Suchocki looked back at the area near where the officers had been and saw only “a small hole and … nothing but a mess of human bodies.” One lifeless figure was eighteen-year-old PFC Albert MacDougall from Cleveland, Ohio. Just moments before, MacDougall had been seen “sitting on a stone pile in the center of the quarry,” but the blast of shrapnel had killed him as well. With no dirt or soft ground to absorb any of the shell’s fragments or concussion, the stone floor and rock wall of the quarry served as an unforgiving backdrop for the explosion. Many who managed to survive were badly injured. The right side of Suchocki’s face felt numb, and he noticed his neck “was hot as fire and a little bleeding.” And after helping carry Jones’s lifeless body, adrenaline loosened its numbing grip on Lieutenant McClure, who realized he had been hit in the face and knee and was getting dizzy from loss of blood. The dimly lit first-aid station in the cliffside was a hive of activity. “That was a busy bunch in there,” McClure observed of the medics, working beyond their capacity as injured men kept appearing. Section leader Sgt. Carl Thoete (pronounced “Thotty”) appeared with chunks of lead in his neck and back and asked a medic to cover the wounds with iodine. Another arrived with his neck gushing blood.
In all, the single blast had killed four and injured two dozen. A fifth of the company’s men and three of its seven officers were casualties. Their position was likely exposed by the airplane observer, and a German howitzer had found its mark with devastating effect only two hours before H-Hour. These engineers were an indispensable piece of Marshall’s operations plan, assigned to assist the infantry with building new trenches once the objective had been gained, as well as constructing and equipping three separate strongpoints. Capt. Horace Smith, the company commander, noted that the shelling “caused an immediate change in plans at the last minute, as each officer had a definitely assigned task.” Lt. Moses Cox remarked that the surprise shelling “made the work very hard for the rest of us as each officer had a well-defined piece of work to do, and it had to be taken care of by the other officers.”
But these engineers had passed their initial test of strength, and the attack served only to fortify their will. Had they allowed the decimation of their company to hamper their mission, the implications for the morning’s planned operation would be demoralizing if not ruinous. Much like Company E after the previous morning’s deadly raid, they suffered no failure of nerve, swiftly regrouped, and prepared themselves for the attack. With the quarry now registered in by the German guns and no longer safe, the engineers sought security down the valley in the edge of the wood line closer to Colonel Ely’s command bunker. Many of those injured in the shell explosion, such as Corporal Suchocki and Sergeant Thoete, refused evacuation for medical treatment and insisted on remaining with their company. By Zero Hour, they would be prepared with the others to go over the top.
* * *
The night’s darkness was giving way to the first faint light of dawn when Lieutenant Sargent arrived at his observation post, a foxhole three feet deep with a single field telephone “which glinted in the starlight.” As he lay on his stomach, concealed by a clump of trees jutting out from the American lines, he scanned across the calm, quiet no-man’s-land and noticed that Cantigny, three hundred yards away, “was a black silhouette against the not-as-dark sky. Not a spark of light in it.” He lay in silence, and as dawn broke, he kept his gaze fixed on the village that stared silently back at him.
After receiving his assignment the day before, Sargent had walked up to the front lines to find his observation post and get his first close look at Cantigny. He had been struck by “how small the village was,” and in the afternoon sun, it “looked peaceful enough” to him. Now, as he surveyed the village in its final moments before destruction, it “blanched white” as the sunlight began to drape over the ragged rooftops. Like a motionless beehive inwardly heaving with hidden Germans, “[t]he buildings of the village remained as silent as if no one was living in them.”
In the two lines of trenches nearby, stretching to his north and south the distance of a mile, the infantry platoons waited. For these soldiers, crouched or propped up shoulder to shoulder against the cold, hard dirt walls of the trench in full gear, fighting a mixture of fear and anxiety and impatience and chilly air, the past few hours had been a tortured stretch of slow time. Officers and NCOs scampered up and down the line ensuring each man had his pack and sufficient ammunition and water. Lieutenant Newhall surmised the men in his platoon, just two hours from going over the top in the first wave, were “seriously subdued” with thoughts that soon “they would be under fire in the open.” But he still spotted nothing in them “which looked like fear, only eagerness to get into the big game.”
Nearly three miles behind the front lines, Maj. Raymond Austin was at his observation point with his binoculars prepared to watch the registration fire of the two dozen 75s of his 6th Field Artillery, scheduled to begin at 4:45 a.m. The hour was selected, as George Marshall noted, because it was “the first moment the light would permit the proper observation of results” yet still late enough to accomplish “without forewarning the enemy of a possible attack.” The step was important to ensure that all guns, particularly the newly placed French guns supporting the attack, were zeroed accurately on their assigned targets for the bombardment. For these purposes, the morning weather was fully cooperating. In stark contrast to the thick morning fog the day before, J-Day was noted in the field artillery brigade journal as “quite clear. More so than usual.” A battery logbook noted the dawn weather as “bright and warm,” as temperatures began to rise comfortably into the sixties.
* * *
At 4:45 a.m. precisely, a few gun batteries erupted with single shots. Artillery observers squinting through binoculars from elevated perches up in trees or hilltops waited through the silence as the shells sailed through the air, then scanned target areas for the location of explosions. Adjustments were made over field telephones connected with specific batteries—to shorten the range, adjust elevation, or shift right or left—and this process repeated with more single shots until every gun was dialed in. A French airplane observer aided in this as well, sending back wireless reports to the French liaison officers at Division Headquarters to relay corrections to artillery groups. Each group of gun batteries was allotted fifteen minutes for this until at hour’s end, they were prepared to unleash the critical preparatory bombardment with devastating precision.
These staccato salvos sailed over the heads of the men waiting in the trenches and lifted their spirits. Though tentative and not sustained, the singular and scattered boom of guns behind their lines broke the silence and finally, as one officer noted, “there was plenty to occupy one’s attention.” Back with the artillery, Major Austin noted “at the first shots the Boches’ sausages [observation balloons] went up in a hurry to see what was going on.” The artillery brigade journal noted “[t]hree enemy balloons up” at 5:08 a.m., and by 5:15 there were at least six. These German observers relayed information to their own artillery batteries, and by 5:40 a.m. German shells were falling in the Saint-Éloi Woods behind the American front lines, where the reserve companies and French support tanks were waiting. Captain Noscereau, the French tank commander, reassured the American soldiers around him: “Tout le artillerie est comme ça. C’est la guerre.” (All artillery is like that. Such is war.) In five more minutes, as the American and French artillery began the planned bombardment on enemy positions, this German shelling would cease.
General Summerall monitored reports from the front with General Bullard down in their wine-cellar headquarters back in Mesnil-Saint-Firmin. Phone lines connected Summerall with each of his three artillery regimental commanders, French liaison officers with the French artillery group commanders, and Bullard with his two brigade commanders as well as a direct line with Colonel Ely in his bunker up near the front. Spread over the three miles of countryside leading from Division Headquarters to the front lines were 386 artillery pieces. Standing by his battery with the 7th Field Artillery, Lt. “Doc” Bedsole of Alabama was amazed as dawn revealed the amount of artillery packed into the area. “How many guns there were in this sector, I don’t know. I counted sixty-four that were in a few hundred yards of my battery.” Every gun had a specific target and rate of fire to last for the next hour until the infantry was to go over the top, and as the final seconds ticked away to 5:45 a.m., each was loaded with a round, and the crews stood by as officers eyed their watches.
* * *
With a thunder that shook the earth, sheets of white flame flew out of nearly four hundred American and French gun pits at 5:45 a.m. precisely, lighting the sky and hurling steel toward German positions at the speed of a half mile per second. The roar shocked even the veteran artillerymen at the guns. “Mother of God!” Lieutenant Bedsole later recounted, “I have never heard such a hellish clamor!” Major Austin noted “at 5:45 all batteries began a heavy raking fire throughout the zone to be covered by our advance … We had guns of all sizes working—up to 10 inch.”
Back deep in the Division Headquarters, brick cellar walls telegraphed the vibrations marking the beginning of the bombardment. No phone call from the front was needed to confirm what was evident, and a staff officer jotted in the artillery brigade journal: “5:45: Fire for destruction starts.” Only four minutes into the loud, sustained rumble the phone rang from one of the observation posts, reporting, “you cannot see Cantigny on account of the smoke.” Outside near his 75s, Major Austin watched the thrashing of the village through binoculars: “The ground was pounded to dust by our shells—all that was visible was the heavy smoke hanging over Cantigny and the ridge.”
To the men at the front lines, the scene was overwhelming. Out at his observation post, Lieutenant Sargent had counted down on his watch the scheduled beginning for the bombardment but was still startled by its eruption. “[A]t 5:45 a.m., the world turned into thunder … I would not know how to exaggerate its roar.” The artillery officer was accustomed to the boom of batteries firing barrages, but he was unable to find adequate words to paint the scene. Having seen the French batteries arrive the day before to supplement the three regiments of American division artillery, he knew the total number of guns was high but noted that “statistics can give no idea of how earthshaking was the sound.”
Up in the far north end of the jumping-off trenches, the confidence of Lieutenant Newhall’s men had been lifted by the registration fire over the previous hour, but the sustained hail of shells that were shrieking over their heads into the German lines boosted morale higher still. “If the men felt confident before, they were doubly so as they watched the ‘big ones’ dropping on the enemy position,” Newhall observed, adding that the Germans “over there, they certainly were getting theirs.” Behind the lines, Lieutenant Waltz noted that the bombardment gave the same lift to the spirits of his six machine-gun crews assembled in the woods around him. “Every one of us came to life, so to speak, and things began to brighten up,” he later recalled. “All of us, at once, sensed the power of our own artillery and knew with that kind of protection the enemy would be helpless.”
Fire filled the sky, and over the village the smoke lay thick and heavy. Pvt. Sam Ervin, newly reinstated and in charge of a dozen-man carrying party of Company I, stood on the crest of a hill behind the front lines and watched the village “practically melt down.” Nearby on crutches, Lieutenant Colonel Marshall hobbled out of Colonel Ely’s bunker to see the bombardment, and later relayed the scene before him: “Cantigny itself took on the appearance of an active volcano, with great clouds of smoke and dust and flying dirt and debris, which was blasted high in the air.”
Seeing the results of such unleashed fury must certainly have satisfied Marshall that all was going according to his plan. This preparatory fire was the critical first step, designed in his words, “to destroy the enemy’s trenches and gun positions, and to demoralize the garrison.” What that left conspicuously unsaid was a necessary consequence of such shelling: destruction of as much of the German garrison as possible. More German soldiers killed or rendered incapable by the opening hour of shellfire would mean quicker and easier success for the American infantry in capturing the objective. And with Germans occupying the village’s deep brick cellars and stone-walled dugouts, this employment of large caliber high-explosive shells was necessary. The artillery onslaught was thus far exceeding expectations, and it was providing an unprecedented show of force for the watching doughboys.
Calibers of 220mm, 240mm, and 280mm—all the big French guns added to the sector the previous day—were firing simultaneously into concentrated areas and transforming empty homes and barns into twisted masses of flame and matchsticks. “The shells kept on going overhead in one steady screeching yowl,” one soldier later recounted, adding that “Cantigny just began to boil up … The air was full of trees, stones, timber, equipment, bodies, everything you can imagine, all smashed up and whirling around with the dirt.” In the front-line trenches with his platoon, Lt. Gerald Tyler observed: “One could see half a building rise a hundred feet in the air, then spread out in all directions.” An officer with a reserve company in the Cantigny Woods watched “a sight never to be forgotten.” The village “was going skyward, large pieces of stone, shell and brick were thrown into our position by the force of the explosion of the larger shells.” That his position was in the southwest corner of the salient over five hundred yards from the nearest village structures gives some idea of the power released by each of the high-explosive shells.
Across no-man’s-land, there was no perceptible reaction from either the German artillery or the garrison in the village. Lieutenant Sargent “could not hear any response from the Germans” up at his observation post and guessed that “[t]he Germans had all been killed.” Lieutenant Newhall noted confidently: “Our artillery was pounding the German lines in such a way as to make it seem probable that we would merely walk over and occupy them.” Lieutenant Waltz shared this optimism, observing that the force of destruction let loose by the heavy artillery “brought the awaiting troops to their feet” in the woods around him. “The results were inspiring.”
* * *
The pervading confidence in the American lines was not misplaced, and unforeseen circumstances were intersecting to give even more effect to this hour of destructive fire. In a stroke of bad fortune for the Germans, the previous night was a scheduled relief of the battalion of the 272nd Reserve Infantry Regiment holding the north half of the village, and the bombardment hit just hours after these men had first arrived at their positions. In fact, many of the soldiers, having marched in full equipment through the dark of night from their reserve positions, had still not yet fully situated themselves before the shelling began. As their regimental commander, Maj. Hans von Grothe, later explained, the bombardment began while they were “still in the act of installing themselves and not sufficiently prepared.” This was the first time this battalion had ever held the front lines, and its members were entirely unfamiliar with the locations of dugouts, fields of fire, observation points, and most things necessary for effective defense. In von Grothe’s words, they “had not yet become fully acquainted with all the details.”
Two German companies held the village of Cantigny itself—the two officers and fifty-five men of the newly arrived 12th Company of the 272nd Reserve Infantry Regiment held the northern half, and the 1st Company of the 271st (a regiment that had been in place for six days) held the southern half. Caught in the vortex of a storm of fire and steel, the men of both companies were driven down into a subterranean web of deep cellars and dugouts where many were either instantly killed by the concussion of explosions or buried alive. Any who had remained above in observation posts were dead. Lieutenant Kuntze, second in command of 12th company, went up to observe the American line during the bombardment but was fatally struck in the head by shrapnel.
The German company held in combat reserve behind the village was 1st Company, led by Lieutenant Schreiber, who ordered his men down into dugouts as the shelling began. He attempted to sound the alarm for artillery support, but was seriously wounded by shrapnel. Sergeant Major Kunnt assumed command and kept the men belowground as the bombing continued. The shelling had severed all phone lines to the rear, thwarting the few attempts made from command posts within the village to call for support, and with runners unable to make it more than a few steps without being blown to bits, all communication with those outside the village was cut off. Signal flares fired by the few survivors aboveground went unseen for all the smoke hanging over the village. The commander of 3rd Company of the 271st, manning the trenches on the south side of the village, believed the shelling to be only retaliation for the previous morning’s raid and did not order flares sent up.
The timing of that previous morning’s raid was now proving fortuitous, as the mistaken belief that this heavy bombardment was merely retaliation also invaded the minds of the German commanders at the battalion and regimental levels, preserving for the Americans the crucial element of surprise for the impending attack. Even without communication from the front, the scale of the bombardment was obvious to the commanders of the German reserve battalions and at regimental headquarters. But presently the smoke hanging over the village concealed the massed American infantry waiting to attack, and guided by a miscalculation of its true purpose in their ground level positions, the German command took no action. If there were any way to discover this bombardment was actually preparatory fire for an attack, it would be by aerial observation.
At that very time, about 6:30 a.m., a German plane was in fact flying high above the American lines. The pilot, Lieutenant Geh, had been tapping out frantic wireless messages over the past half hour trying to warn of what he could see was a planned attack, but with no response. He had taken off an hour earlier with the mission of locating the range for a gun battery from the unit holding the sector to the immediate south, the 25th Reserve Division. Immediately upon gaining altitude, the clear morning light had revealed to him the beginning of the bombardment and, behind it, thousands of American riflemen huddled in trenches and massed in the woods. Geh sent a wireless message at 5:57 but received no response. Circling overhead, he sent another: “Enemy preparing attack against 82nd reserve Division in sectors b and c [north and south sides of Cantigny].” Again he got no response. Between 6:13 and 6:42, he would send four requests for artillery support fire against the American lines across from Cantigny and receive no reply.
Because Lieutenant Geh had taken off as an artillery observer, the German wireless stations set up to receive aviator messages were not notified of his flight. Regardless, five of the six wireless aerials in that sector had already been destroyed by the morning shellfire. Back down south in the sector from where he took off, a lone operator at one wireless station, Private Lehman, did in fact receive Geh’s reports of the impending attack and requests for targeted artillery fire. But due to a “special understanding” that “no attention should be paid to reports of the aviator not connected to range finding,” Lehman sat on them. It was inaction that the division commander, Gen. Oskar von Watter, would later say “cannot be justified,” and that would carry deadly consequences for the Germans.
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Back in Division Headquarters, Generals Bullard and Summerall and their staffs monitored the jangling telephones for reports from the front, particularly any news of enemy artillery firing on the American jumping-off trenches. Twelve minutes into the bombardment, all signs had been good with the report, “Enemy artillery very quiet,” but in the same minute came word of American shells “falling short” into the corner of the Cantigny Woods, where the men of Captain Stuart Campbell’s reserve company from the 18th were waiting. By 6:07 a.m., another call from the front reported more “shorts” with the sighting of a “[s]ix star white rocket” flare fired in the Saint-Éloi Woods, a signal to the artillery to “lengthen the range.” Artillery “shorts” were a tragic and rare occurrence typically caused by a bad charge or defective ammunition, and given the unprecedented number of shells being fired that morning, the possibility was a risk that had been calculated and accepted by the planners. Still, although a 6:16 a.m. entry in the brigade artillery journal noted “[a]nother report that 75’s are falling short” in the Saint-Éloi Woods, not a single American casualty was reported through the hour-long bombardment.
That these “friendly” shorts were the only few desultory shells reported falling in the American front lines and wooded reserve positions is itself proof of the bombardment’s success in keeping the German artillery fire suppressed. The big guns of the French Corps artillery not devoted to pulverizing the village were tasked with counter-battery work—firing gas and high-explosive shells around every known enemy gun emplacement, destroying or rendering incapable each gun crew. By all accounts this was thus far successful. Two French pilots were in the sky far on the other side of the village watching German artillery positions carefully for any signs of activity, and by 6:35 a.m., only four of the ninety known German guns were reported “in action.” By H-Hour, they too would be silenced.
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By 6:40 a.m., one artillery officer estimated that “any Germans who were not in deep dugouts must have been dead.” With five minutes remaining until H-hour, the preparatory bombardment had lasted its scheduled fifty-five minutes and succeeded in all its aims, proving lethally effective in destroying German positions, cutting off communications, and suppressing all means of retaliatory fire. Pvt. John Johnston of La Crosse, Wisconsin, one of thousands of men filling two sets of mile-long trenches and buoyed by the previous hour’s stunning display of firepower preparing their pathway into battle, called it “a million dollar barrage.” Like those on either side of him, John readied himself mentally to go over the top and attack, and his simple recollection of the moment seems the most universal depiction of the mixed emotions of thousands of men, young and old, facing their first daring encounter with history: “I can truthfully say that every man had a prayer on his lips.”